ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Marc Kase of SAIC

After lunch, I attended a couple of ARIS customer breakouts, the first of which was Marc Kase of SAIC. I won’t give a lot of detail about their business processes, since I’m not sure how much that they really want to share outside the conference, but there were some great points and lessons learned that are more generic.

One of the first stats that hit me on the SAIC case is that they moved from 700 to 70 (it may have been 78 — I was in the back and the print on the slide was small) job roles as part of their process modelling efforts, which is an incredible success story.

They’ve focussed on building a business architecture, with process models created for projects stored in local repositories, then promoted to a central enterprise architecture repository at certain milestones. From this, they’ve been able to see a number of benefits:

  • Context, e.g., which systems use which data
  • Documentation that allows requirements and design to be traced back to business processes
  • Standards enforcement
  • Ability to cascade changes across models
  • Web publication of process and architecture content
  • Strengthened ties between IT and functional process owners

They also learned a few lessons, such as some of the difficulties in enforcing change control in moving from a single project to a portfolio of projects, and some practical issues around setting tightly-controlled standards in order to reduce the user learning curve; in fact, with the appropriate filters and standards in place, their users find ARIS “much easier to use than Visio”.

They have a number of plans for 2007, including simulation, integration with a number of other systems including their BPMS, building out the complete enterprise business architecture, and using “system of systems engineering” to track interdependencies between projects.

ProcessWorld Day 1: BPM for SOA breakout with Bill Swanton of AMR Research

For the first breakout session today, I heard Bill Swanton, who’s VP Research at AMR Research. Although the topic was “BPM is the value in SOA”, Swanton talked a lot about SOA-ing your ERP. AMR has obviously done a lot of research in this area, and he had some good thoughts on the ERP long-term lifecycle. ERP systems are often monolithic, and therefore not so easily pushed aside or interfaced with services. What ends up happening is “SOA by evolution”, where an ERP system (he mentioned SAP ERP and Oracle Fusion in particular) is wrapped to create specific service interfaces, although the  internal processes remain fixed.

He did discuss the use of technology is a catalyst for changes in business, and stated from their research that 66% of organizations implementing SOA are hoping to improve their business processes. I’m not sure that I agreed with his characterization of BPM and BAM as “key components of SOA”, but I loved the analogy of SOA as the corporate “patch panel”.

He had an interesting chart about how SOA needs vary with the complexity/enterprise spread of existing systems, and degree of customization. If different software is used in different business units and there’s a lot of customization, then the goal of SOA is usually to reduce development costs and reuse existing custom software; there will be a tendency to layer custom layers on top of the existing custom development. At the opposite corner of the chart, where an organization has an enterprise-wide ERP with little customization, they’re looking to compose unique business processes out of the ERP vendor’s provided services that can be a competitive differentiator for them.

Swanton sees a number of short-term challenges — and therefore slower ROI — as organizations transition from traditional applications through hybrid solutions to a true SOA, one of these being the showdown between ERP and SOA vendors for same space. He notes that the ERP vendors are not, in general, making radical changes, which seemed to imply that the SOA vendors might pull ahead on this front.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Gartner Keynote with Jim Sinur and Michael Blechar

Following the keynote by Prof. Scheer, we had the Gartner tag team of Jim Sinur (who covers BPM overall) and Michael Blechar (who covers modelling, information architecture, and model-driven architecture) on the subject of “What’s New With BPM?” They did a great back-and-forth presentation on stage, although they did end up with the inevitable plug for the upcoming Gartner BPM summit in San Diego.

The audience, on survey, were self-declared as more than 50% IT, which surprised me a bit, considering the earlier comments from IDS Scheer about how 80% of their users are now business people.

Blechar started off by talking about how the requirement for modelling comes from people looking for ways to rapidly prototype, design, assemble and orchestrate business processes; being able to compose business processes from services while maintaining a corporate context; moving away from high level of enterprise architecture to the reality of a business architecture that’s controlled by the business people. Sinur followed with Gartner’s definition of BPM as a management practice and structured approach, how the current focus on optimization/measurement goals are bringing modelling and execution closer together, and the business process maturity model.

There were a number of concepts that I’ve seen in other Gartner presentations, both at their BPM summit last year and in webinar, such as how responsibilities for BPM are assigned across the enterprise (business, IT, or shared), and their “gear” diagram of BPM suites with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the centre and the 10 essential functionalities surrounding it. New to this diagram from previous versions is collaboration and inline optimization, which Sinur discussed at length. He made the point that this doesn’t all have to come from one vendor, saying “BPM is an architecture, not a technology, a BPM suite is one way to implement that architecture.”

There was also a discussion of BPM and SOA approaches and roles, looking at the key roles for both BPM and SOA, and (once again) how the work of design and modelling is divided between the business analysts and the IT folks. A process-centric view of an organization tends to favour business analysts for most of the process modelling and design, although many BPMS vendor modelling tools have realistically only been usable by IT, which opens the door for the use of business-focussed modelling tools like ARIS. By involving the business side in the modelling and design of processes, business will start to understand the value of services and SOA — something that’s still a pretty hard sell in a lot of organizations outside the IT department.

With the new focus on collaboration and inline optimization, Gartner believes that processes will become less deterministic: less focussed on a predetermined “happy path”, and more goal-oriented. As new pathways and process maps emerge to meet those goals, they become input to the next round of process discovery.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Keynote with Prof. Scheer

The opening keynote this morning was by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, the founder and serious brain-trust behind IDS Scheer. You have to love this guy: not only is he brilliant and able to describe his ideas clearly, he opened and closed his session by playing sax in a jazz trio on stage.

He covered a lot of material in his talk, and I can’t begin to do it justice but will try to hit a few of the high points.

The goal of a modelling tool like ARIS is to support business processes from strategy to model to detailed description to implementation, including changes to any part of that chain and how the changes ripple through the other layers. The design-implementation-control life cycle of business processes, with a current strong focus on the optimization end of things, serves to bring together process modelling and execution like never before.

The business model at the top of any business process is the key competitive differentiator for an organization, requiring identification of the value proposition, supply chain, and target customer. This places the business model, and the surrounding business architecture, as part of an overall enterprise architecture. Looking at the business process architecture stack (think Zachman column 2), the business model leads to the business process, which requires/populates the business process repository. This, in turn, populates the IT-business process repository for the subset of the processes to be automated, through standardized modelling formats like BPMN and serialization formats like BPEL, which in turn connect to the enterprise service repository that documents the underlying services. Surrounding all this is the business process platform for service assembly/orchestration, portals, B2B, WFMS (wow, haven’t heard that term for a while: workflow management systems, for the youngsters in the crowd) and EAI.

IDS Scheer is involved with (or at least concerned with) a number of process-related standards, including ones such as BPMN and IDEF at the business process modelling level. I’m interested to see if they’re involved in the BPM Think Tank that OMG runs, such as the one coming up in July in San Francisco — an email exchange with someone from OMG a few minutes ago indicate that they’re not heavily involved in OMG standards. ARIS’ business model metamodel and their generally high level of innovation could almost certainly contribute to OMG standards development, if they’re not already.

One interesting point that Prof. Scheer finished with (well, before he started playing sax again) was that BPMS (i.e., process execution) vendor platforms will continue to be proprietary in spite of their “commitment” to standards (my quotation marks, since I agree with this thought), so products like ARIS are necessary in order to help facilitate the movement of models between execution systems. The business view needs to be open, while the implementation layer will remain proprietary.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Press/Analyst Briefing

I’m going to do as much live blogging as possible in order to give you a sense of what’s going on here, which means that I won’t be doing a lot of in-depth analysis in these posts, but will try to add more of that after a bit of introspection.

This is the first IDS Scheer user conference that I’ve attended, and one of the first conferences where I’ve attended a press/analyst briefing. I’ve spent the past 12 years implementing BPM systems, doing design and architecture, and this transition to “press/analyst” is still a bit weird for me, although I’m sure that I’ll get used to it 🙂 One nice thing about these conferences is getting to meet people who I’ve only ever “met” online, such as Gregg Rock from BPM Institute, and Jim Sinur from Gartner.

The briefing was hosted by Sinur, and included a panel of IDS Scheer executives: Thomas Volk (CEO), Dr. Wolfram Jost (CTO), Dr. Mathias Kirchmer (Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer), and Charlie Doucot (SVP of Sales for the Americas).

In Volk’s high-level update on IDS Scheer at the start of the briefing, I found that the BPM acronym is being used here to focus on the modelling end of the spectrum; not surprising, but likely causes some confusion still in the marketplace where BPMS vendors push BPM as an acronym for the execution end of the spectrum.

We heard from Jost about some of their new technology that we’ll see showcased here this week, and rolled out over the coming months:

  • As a result of their partnership with Corticon, an integration of the rules engine into modelling as a Business Rules Designer, which is being piloted at Barclays Bank now
  • A new SOA Designer (piloting within SAP, who is a user as well as an OEM partner) for modelling services and bringing business modelling to SOA
  • A new version of Business Optimizer
  • Six “solutions” that are pre-made combinations of their underlying products in order to offer specific vertical market solutions

Volk discussed some of the corporate expansion initiatives: although the bulk of their revenue is still in Europe, they are opening an office on the US west coast (I heard something about the Mountain View area, presumably to be close to Oracle) in addition to the current eastern US offices. They are also expanding in Asia from their strong base in Japan, including 100 people in China and further expansion plans in other Asian countries, through partnerships as well as regional offices. They will be announcing many more partnerships in the coming months, and see both OEM and SI partners as a crucial part of their growth.

I was particularly intrigued by the innovation relationships that they have with a number of universities around the world. Having graduated in Engineering from University of Waterloo, I’m very aware of the amazing things that can happen from the synergy between an innovation-minded technology company and a university, so I think that this is a great idea. I had to chuckle at one comment from Jost during the discussion of customers where they are helping to drive innovation and piloting their products: he mentioned VW/Audi, then qualified that with “they’re a big automotive company in Germany”, as if we might not have heard of them. I love the weird language and cultural mashups that occur when people from different countries get together (the Germans also say proh-cess instead of praw-cess, so I feel right at home), although I think that IDS Scheer needs to loosen up a bit in the press conference format to fit the more casual North American business environment.

There was a discussion based on a question from the floor about the involvement of business people both in the decision to purchase ARIS, and the general user population, and it appears that more and more non-technical people are using the product and attending the conference. 10 years ago, 80% of users were technical; now 80% have a business background or are in a business function. They’ve seen a definite change in mindset over recent years for business to drive IT rather than vice versa. Sinur expanded with what Gartner is seeing, in that as organizations migrate from functional excellence to end-to-end process excellence, it forces business and IT to work together across the organization and also facilitates a larger role for business.

We also heard about how they differentiate their product from the modelling capabilities within a BPMS, a topic that I’ve been looking at lately. They see ARIS as process modelling in a larger context, not just for execution but for the management of business processes and their performance. They see the modelling done in BPMS products as “technical” modelling, whereas ARIS is for “business” modelling, a distinction that I think is starting to get a bit fuzzy as the BPMS vendors introduce different views/personalities in their modelling tools for different roles. However, it is the case that you can’t use a BPMS modelling tool to model non-automated processes, only those things that will be executed/automated by the BPMS, so there is some value to IDS Scheer’s perspective on this. ARIS can integrate with a number of BPMS engines, including SAP NetWeaver, Oracle Fusion, IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA Weblogic, Fujitsu Interstate, and TIBCO; most of these vendors come from the ESB space so haven’t developed the same sophistication of modelling tools as the pure-play BPMS vendors or those from human-facing workflow origins, and most benefit from partnership with a serious modelling product like ARIS.

ARIS ProcessWorld

I’m at the IDS Scheer user conference this week, so expect to see a lot of blogging about that around here. Leaving Toronto in -15C for +15C in Jacksonville, Florida wasn’t my only reason for attending; I’m very interested in how people are modelling their processes more collaboratively, and a room full of real users is the best way to get a good cross-section. As I wrote yesterday, I’m also interested in how processes are moving from a model to an executable environment, since I think that there’s still a lot of people who are recreating those models in their BPMS after they’ve already been created once in a process modelling tool like ARIS or ProVision. I saw a press release early today how about IDS Scheer and Fujitsu will be showing off their integration at the conference this week, and I imagine that there will be a few other BPMS vendors there with the same story.

I had a great conversation at tonight’s reception with a couple of people from an end-user organization about the whole modelling-execution conundrum, and hope to have more of this over the next few days. I also want to see what customers are doing to advance modelling/design collaboration in their enterprises.

All related posts this week will be tagged with the category ARISProcessWorld.

Disclosure: IDS Scheer covered my expenses to attend. If you think that’s not fair, keep in mind that I’m an independent analyst/architect/blogger and I’m not paid for the blogging part (that’s right, I don’t work for ebizQ, they just host my blog), so 4 days down here means 4 lost days of real billable work for me.